Since this conversation happened just last sunday, I’m going to put down the things that I do remember from the conversation and then deconstruct them. Most of the items are things that have been brought up before by my parents (and answered here), but some new things did pop up. I’ll be covering the following items.
- The definition of Evidence
- Types of evidence
- Historical Document Evidence
- Examples of Evidence for God
- The reliability of the gospels for their supernatural claims
- Why science constantly updates it’s body of knowledge
- Evolution
- The book of Isaiah, special attention paid to Isaiah 54
The Definition of Evidence
According to the Oxford Languages dictionary, the “Evidence” consists of two definitions, depending on whether it is being used as a noun or a verb.
Evidence (n): the available body of facts or information indicating whether a belief or proposition is true or valid.
Evidence (v): be or show evidence of
Let’s examine this in a little more detail.
Types of Evidence
In my mind, very broadly (and very, very laymans-termsy) speaking, there are two types of evidence: Good Evidence and Bad Evidence.
Good Evidence provides a compelling case for a particular claim above all others. Multiple people reviewing this evidence should be brought to very similar, if not the exact same, conclusion. This does not, however, mean that the result indicated by the evidence is immediately apparent. The output of a statistical report may indicate a clear and compelling case for a particular result, but you need to understand how to interpret it.
Bad Evidence either does not provide a compelling case for a particular claim above all others or fails to provide a compelling case for a particular claim. Oftentimes, multiple people reviewing the same body of bad evidence will come away with wildly different interpretations of the evidence. Like good evidence, the intended result may not be immediately apparent, but unlike good evidence, the interpretations that are given diverge wildly.
A straightforward example of good evidence can be found in making the claim that gravity is a force that exists. You state that if gravity was a force that did not exist, items dropped should remain where they are. You can readily pick up an item, drop it, and observe that it accelerates towards the ground quickly. You can repeat this experiment as many times as you wish, recording your observations each time. Your evidence for this claim are your observations, which you have noted down.
Now, anyone can review your notes. They can look them over and see if your experiment was flawed in some way that could skew the results. While it’s not required, they can repeat your experiment wherever they are in the world to see if their results match yours. They can try variations on your experiment to see if there are things you did not account for. By the end of it, they should be convinced that your claim that gravity is a force that exists is indeed true.
Because the bible is often cited by my parents as evidence for their claims, we have to examine why it is not a good form of evidence. My mother has already remarked that it is curious how we are both looking at the same evidence and drawing different conclusions. While this is already a red flag about the quality of the evidence, let’s examine how one can determine the reliability of a document.
Historical Document Evidence
Unfortunately, things become more difficult when looking at history. While I am personally a huge fan of empiricism, you cannot run experiments on history. There’s no hotline to the 1400’s to tell Colombus to not go find another route to the Indies just to see what happens. You can’t call Katherine the Great and ask her about her relationship to the church. You can’t peer through the window of Rasputin’s last meal and determine what the strange circumstances around his death really were.
Instead of direct observation, historians are left with collections of documents and other artifacts, and have to evaluate their reliability to determine what most probably happened. To narrow the scope, I’m going to focus on just documents. This often involves examining the document’s origin, authorship, context, claims, and reason for being written. While this is by no means comprehensive, here are some criteria used to determine if a document is reliable.
- Origin
- The creator of the document is someone who can be trusted.
- The type of source (academic journal, letter, etc)
- Perspective
- Perhaps the creator has a privileged or unique perspective on a situation
- Specific nationality, career, etc
- Context
- The document was made at an important point in time related to the event
- Made on the same day, during/for a convention about it, etc
- Intended Audience
- A piece written for the public is often far different than a private letter
- Motive
- Why was the document written?
- Does the document push a specific narrative?
Do note that reliability is not a guarantee of accuracy. For example, the author of a scary Soviet era propaganda poster may be completely reliable (written by someone of trustworthy origin, has a unique perspective on the situation, written during the events, intended to inform the public, trying to persuade to a particular viewpoint), but not truthful. Anyone can write anything, so you need to work harder to establish the probable truth.
For probable truth to be established, you need to do several things.
- Determine if the document’s claims are probable
- Determine if the document’s claims are possible
- Determine if the motives for writing the document create bias
- Account for the bias if it exists
- Corroborate with other documents to establish more context about the situation
- Search for additional documents about the situation
In the propaganda poster example given above, you start by determining if the claims are probable. They seem like they might be, and they are certainly possible. Unfortunately, you come across documents indicating that the author of the poster was trying to ensure that the people support his party over another, which led to using language that demonized the other party. After corroborating other documents which show that the party had a track record of unfairly portraying any political opponents or ideas that were not party approved, it seems most probably that the poster itself is not true. The context it provides about the party, that they were willing to try slander their opponents, is.
Applying These Criteria to the Gospels
Since we have talked about standards for historical reliability, let’s examine each of the gospels and see how they fare. For the purposes of this analysis, I’m going to assume that the documents as we see them are exactly as they were written (ie: ignoring interpolations that happened over the years).
Mark
Written first around 66-70CE, and published anonymously, we’re left to wonder a great deal about Mark.
Origins
The origins of Mark are uncertain. While Christians like to ascribe authorship to Mark the Evangelist, the companion apostle of Peter, we lack any evidence for this claim. The piece was published anonymously with the author’s anonymity remaining to this day.
Perspective
The writer of Mark pulls heavily from the Jewish traditions, pulling in concepts such as The Son of Man, the Messiah, and The Kingdom of God. All these show up often in the book, often to the confusion of the apostles.
Like in the origins, we know nothing about what unique perspective the author may have other than Mark appears to have been passingly familiar with Jewish traditions.
Context
Assuming that Jesus existed and have lived to his 30’s, Mark was written at least 30 years after Jesus’ death. It’s very likely that Mark was built from a collection of stories that were circulating at the time (commonly known as the Q document).
Intended Audience
Mark appears to be written for a public audience, specifically with Christian believers in mind. Despite it’s usage of Jewish concepts, it seems to be written for a non-Jewish audience since it often goes out of it’s way to explain Jewish rituals.
Motive
Mark appears to have been written to strengthen the faith of the faithful, not to try convert nonbelievers. It’s also possible that the author wanted to bring the collection of tales about Jesus into a definitive source.
Conclusion
Mark appears to have been written to pull together a collection of stories about a figure named Jesus in the early first century. There are claims of magical abilities, such as casting out demons, raising the dead, healing people, and being able to feed 4000 people with a few loaves of bread.
Mark has a rough start by claiming to cite Isaiah in Mark 1:2-3, but of the verses quoted one is actually from Malachi 3:1. This shows that the author may not have been too concerned with making sure his claims are factual.
The primary concern with Mark’s reliability is it’s continual usage of magic in it’s narrative. We have no verifiable examples of magic, every claim of magic that has been tested has been demonstrated to be false. Due to this, we have no reason to assume that the gospel of Mark is reliable in it’s claims for their occurrence.
The gospel of Mark might have some small measure of historical reliability in it’s non-supernatural claims, but these are very far and few between.
Matthew
Matthew was written after, and derives a fair amount, from Mark. Like Mark, Matthew was also released anonymously, preventing much from being known about the writer.
Origins
The author released this work publicly and anonymously. While some information can be picked up about the writer from the work, such as the fact that Matthew was familiar with Jewish traditions, nothing definite about who might have written this is known.
Perspective
Matthew is well versed in the Jewish traditions, seemingly well aware of the many claims in the old testament that were left unfulfilled. He appears to be using his narrative to try explain how the stories about Jesus fulfill Jewish prophecies.
Context
Assuming Jesus lived into his 30’s, this work was published 40-60 years after his death.
Intended Audience
Matthew appears to be targeting a Jewish audience who may be sympathetic to the tale of Christianity. The Romans are viewed as aggressors while the Jewish people are primarily cast as onlookers or sympathetic characters.
Motive
Matthew is attempting to show that Jesus is clearly the Jewish Messiah which has been prophesied for the past several centuries. He does this by finding prophecies that were unfulfilled previously in the old testament, and reads them into the narratives of Jesus.
Conclusion
Matthew borrows a lot from Mark. Reading through the two, there is very little in Mark that is not in Matthew. To me, this implies that the writer of Matthew was unsatisfied with the relatively short tale of Mark, and felt the need to build on the tale to better persuade the Jewish audience that Jesus is the Messiah they’ve all been waiting for.
To try persuade the Jewish people, Matthew starts with a Genealogy to establish that Jesus came from the lineage of David. This is immediately called into conflict by the next author we’ll look at, Luke, and has no historical evidence for it. At many other points, Matthew tries to tie back tales about Jesus to old testament texts. These attempts fall flat when reading through the old testament texts since Jesus is never mentioned, even indirectly, in any of them.
Matthew writes in historical figures to the tales to give credence to his gospel, but some, such a Herod, were dead (4BCE) before the alleged date of birth. The flight to Egypt, unique to Matthew, is not attested in any other gospel or historical source.
In addition to the problems arising from the old testament not support Matthew’s claims, Matthew has a fair amount of magic use. Like in any other document, we should not accept the tale of magic use without a reasonable explanation for why this document is given special credence when all others are not.
On the whole, Matthew looks like a blatant attempt to find prophecies in the old testament, find some way to mangle them into fitting the Christian Jesus narrative, and then claiming success. If the verses pointed out were clear and unambiguously talking about Jesus, that would be another story. On the whole, the reliability of Matthew seems to be low since the author appears to be more interested in theology and persuasion than truth.
Luke
Luke was written around the same time as Matthew. Like Matthew, a large portion of Mark is retold or expanded upon in this work.
Origins
Like the other gospels, Luke was written and published anonymously. Based on the writing style, it seems likely that the author had likely received some for of formal education.
Perspective
Luke tries to establish himself as a reliable source. This is based off of writing style, continually trying to keep details in mind, and a general “pompousness” in the opening narration to look similar to other educated writings of the time.
Context
Luke was likely released around the same time as Matthew. As such, Luke did not draw upon Matthew for inspiration, but Mark. Assuming Jesus lived to his 30’s, Luke was written 40-60 years after Jesus’s death. There is some evidence in Introduction the Synoptic Gospels (Perkins, 2009) that it may have been worked on well into the 2nd century, which would put the release date closer to 70-80 years after instead.
Intended Audience
Luke is primarily concerned with a Christian audience.
Motive
The stated motive of Luke is to persuade the reader to accept his tale through providing an orderly account of events. For those who are already Christian, this would provide a logically compelling reason to believe in addition to faith.
Conclusion
Despite his attempt to try provide an orderly account of events, Luke does not try to give a historically grounded reason for his claims. Much like Matthew, he gives an account of Jesus’s supposed lineage. Comparing the lineage in Luke to Matthew shows that neither line up. The obvious conclusion here is that one or both are made up. Further undermining Luke is the admission that his accounts are based on hearsay in Luke 1:2.
To the author’s credit, attempts are made to provide an orderly account. Luke starts at the beginning with the birth of Jesus, and follows the character through to his death. Unfortunately, the historical details that he brings in to enhance his tale, such as Augustus decreeing a census and the darkness around Jesus’s death, are a clear fabrications with no evidence for them.
Like the other gospels, Luke relies on magic usage to sell the narrative of Jesus as a divine being. Just like in the other gospels, we need a good reason to believe that these events of magic usage were true, and again, no good reason is other given.
Luke’s account of events seems to be expanding upon Mark, an already shaky source. Given the shaky sourcing, and the difficulty keeping events straight, I would not rate Luke as a very reliable source.
John
John appears to have been written relatively independently of the other three gospels, sharing relatively little in common with them other than the central themes of Christianity.
Origin
We know just as little about the author of John as we do about the other gospels. John was published anonymously.
Perspective
The author claims to be “The Disciple which Jesus loved”. This is suspect, however, since such a claim without evidence for it appears to be an attempt to lend undue credence to the writing. Additionally, the clear departure from the other gospels calls into doubt either Mark, Matthew, and Luke, or John itself.
Context
John was released during a period of time when there were many debates about the exact nature of Jesus. Some questions considered at this time were “Was Jesus fully God?”, “Was Jesus a Man?”, and “Was Jesus capable of suffering?”. Many others were still being ironed out, the answers to which caused several schisms in the church going forwards.
Intended Audience
John’s intended audience is other Christians that already believe in Christianity. The fantastical claims within would not be compelling to anyone who was not a Christian already.
Motive
John is trying to convince Christians that Jesus is, without any doubt, God.
Conclusion
John takes the previously established works and throws them out the window. John has many works of magic, focusing very strongly on how very godlike Jesus is.
With how little sourcing John makes of any of the other gospels, it’s likely that the author either had a collection of tales that he hear growing up, had access to a source not known by the others, or simply made up a lot of stories to make sure his viewpoint is supported. Given that there is no support for the tales told by the author, there is no reason to assume the author is interested in the truth.
The amount of magic throughout John puts the other gospels to shame. While the other gospels try to portray Jesus as a man who is doing his best to be godlike, John works as a mythmaker to turn Jesus into a veritable legend. Unlike the the other gospels that imply Jesus came into being relatively recently, John claims that Jesus has always been present.
With no reason to believe the magical claims in this book, lack of sources, and lack of support from the other gospels, I’d put the reliability of John as the lowest of all four gospels.
Examples of Evidence for God
As you might expect, this section begins with a definition. Relating to gods, I need to answer the question “Which one?”.
I’m going to focus on the Christian God specifically, since that is the one I’m most often confronted with. I’m going to ascribe to the deity all the usual attributes I see most often attributed to it. This means ascribing some logically contradictory attributes, but I’ll simply mention that they exist and then ignore the problems they create. To me, this means I’ll assume the god has the following attributes and accomplishments to it’s name.
Attributes
- Omnipotent
- Omniscient
- Omnibenevolent
- Father/Son/Holy Spirit split. ie: the “triune god”.
- Desires a relationship with you. Yes, you. Specifically. You. You’re special.
Accomplishments
- Created literally everything
- Inspired the creation of the bible
- Died and came back to life
Again, other than mentioning that the problems exist, I’m going to ignore logical problems that having a being with the classic tri-omni attributes causes, and I’ll also ignore the inconsistency of the triune god concept being a monotheistic faith/not actually being in the bible.
Based on the above, here is a non-exhaustive list of three things that I would consider evidence for a god with these attributes.
- Evidence of intelligent design
- Verifiable scientific data in the bible
- A repeatable process to be visited by god
Evidence of Intelligent Design
Let’s start with the claim that god literally created everything. According to the bible, this it described in two different creation myths: Genesis 1 and Genesis 2. The Christians I have talked to (and many I have heard online) imply that everything was created perfect with humans being the most favored creation. Let’s focus on these prefect designs.
If life was intelligently designed, we would expect to see life with evidence of intelligent design. Creatures could be made in any way that suits the whims of their designer so long as they worked well. I would consider intelligently designed animals a strong case that a god exists, especially if their forms were highly unique, efficient, and problematic designs were not shared between related species.
Instead, there are many examples of unintelligent origins. For example, if we look at the animal kingdom, we see that mammals share a blind spot in their vision. This happens because the optic nerve and a blood vessel enter the eye at that point, causing a lack of photo receptors in the back of the eye. This is a very small problem, mammals compensate for it without ever knowing it’s there, but it’s hardly one that we would expect to find in any intelligently designed animal… especially not humans if we were so specially created by a god.
Another example is the Vagus nerve in your throat. This nerve starts near your ear, travels down your throat, loops around your heart, and then travels back up to your larynx. That means we have a nerve that’s around 30 cm (1 foot) longer than it really has to be. This problem is especially pronounced in Giraffes where the nerve can be several meters in length when 30cm would be more than enough.
Time and time again, we can find examples of shared and unintelligent origins. If a designer does not exist, this indicates a few things about them. For example, the immense complexity of organisms indicates a designer who is not interested in any elegant solutions to the problems faced by creatures, and the problems shared between related species shows that the designer was sloppy and copied badly made designs. All these issues are far better explained when one considers evolution, which is touched on below.
Verifiable Scientific Data in the Bible
If the bible was inspired by a omniscient being, it seems obvious that some method of verifying it’s veracity should have been included.
God, as an omniscient being, would already know that not everyone is going to be convinced a hodge-podge collection of books. This is especially true if god designed some people to be far more skeptical than others. In fact, as the omniscient inspirer, God would know exactly what to put in the bible to ensure that literally everyone who reads it would be convinced of it’s truth.
Having any form of a testable claim that is repeatable, yields consistent results, and was definitely not something available to the local pre-science cultures of the times would be a wonderful form of evidence for divine inspiration. For example, if the bible began with “In the beginning, there was god, and god created light with a speed of about 2.9 million meters per second”, we could test that claim and verify it. Or, perhaps, there’s a simpler claim about the true nature of reality that indicates, in clear unambiguous terms not up for interpretation, that quantum mechanics exists. Or perhaps there’s an accurate set of predictions that perfectly indicate what technological progress would look like that requires no form of metaphorical interpretation to understand.
Any of these would be a good indicator of some advanced knowledge well outside of the time and place of the people who wrote the books. Instead, the most advanced scientific knowledge in the bible just happens to coincide with the most advanced scientific knowledge available at the time. In fact, the bible endorses a worldview full of impossible or demonstrably false things, such as
- Astrology
- A flat earth
- Magic
- Impossible geometry
- Psychics
- Stars small enough to land on earth
Unfortunately, any verifiable claims about the natural or supernatural world that supersedes the current knowledge of the time does not exist in the bible. Claims about the supernatural world (angels, demons, heaven, hell, prayer, magic healing, etc) are never given a method to test that they exist, how they work, or that they are real. When the few supernatural claims that can be tested have been, such as prayer, they have always fallen flat.
A Repeatable Process to be Visited by God
If God wants a relationship with people, the best way to make sure that such a relationship can start is to ensure that these people can contact you, and receive an answer, in a clear and unambiguous way. While how much Christians’ god supposedly wants a relationship with people, this is important.
Christians often claim that prayer is a way of contacting God, and that you will receive responses from god. For example, let’s say you pray for rain. Here are the most common answers I’ve heard Christians claim they get.
- Did it rain?
- The answer was yes.
- Did it not rain?
- The answer was no.
- Did it not rain the day you prayed, but rained anytime in the future?
- The answer was yes, but not yet.
Unfortunately, there is no way to determine whether the act of praying actually caused a chain of events that led to rain. When you pray, god doesn’t show up and let you know directly what you can expect. You don’t receive a letter in the mail letting you know that your request for rain has been heard and was denied. You don’t even get a simple “one knock for yes, two knocks for no” on your door to let you know what the answer is. Instead, you’re forced to look at events that happen and try infer an answer into the events.
If prayer was reliably, repeatably, and obviously a method for contacting a deity, then there would be little doubt that god does exist.
The Reliability of the Gospels for their Supernatural Claims
The gospels make a lot of claims about supernatural events. Virgin births, magic healing of people, and more. Since, according to Christians, the bible is the divine word of god, we should believe that these events truly happened. It’s odd, however, that other religious texts are not viewed this way.
For example, both Buddhists and Hindus have many religious texts that detail their faith. These texts make supernatural claims, and they are also quite old. Some of them are older than many books in the bible. Should we believe that these events actually happened since they are old, religious texts that were supposedly inspired?
When looking at historical works, we do not assume that supernatural claims, religious or otherwise, are true. As Carl Sagan said, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. We need truly extraordinary evidence to believe these claims, and none has ever been provided.
If the bible truly provided extraordinary evidence of it’s supernatural claims, they would not still be a matter of open debate. While some biographical history can be found within them, they are clearly written with the intent of glorifying Jesus and include mythological elements within them. While the gospels may be similar in nature to historical biographies in some respect, they include too many elements of mythologizing that calls their accuracy into question.
For example, Mark starts off with a fairly mundane version of Jesus. Matthew and Luke build upon the figure and ascribe far more power to him. John develops Jesus into a figure of myth and legend who has the power of God in his hands.
Rather than assuming that the bible is somehow an exception while all others are false – a case of special pleading – we should examine the bible’s reliability to see how well it meets the criteria of a reliable and accurate historical document. If, after being looked at, it’s reliability is shown to be high, then we could start lending some credence to it’s words.
As shown earlier, though, the reliability of the gospels for knowledge about the world is shoddy at best. Since no good evidence has ever brought forth to support them, the supernatural claims in old texts like the bible should not be believed.
Science Constantly Updates it’s Body of Knowledge
One particularly aggravating thing that happened during our conversation was the following exchange.
Her: So what, is science your religion?
Me: No. Science is a collection of facts. A body of knowledge about the world. Thinking of it as a religion doesn’t make sense. It doesn’t tell you what to do.
Her: What about when science gets things wrong?
Me: Then it updates itself to be accurate again. It’s a self correcting process by design. The bible, on the other hand, does not and has not changed.
Her: Exactly! [implying that the bible must be true]
Because the fact that scientists will update their worldview when new information comes out is somehow a bad thing, I need to spend some time driving the following home: this is a Good Thing. Conversely, the fact that the bible has not changed (ignoring interpolations and theology driven changes) in thousands of years makes following it’s advice a Bad Thing in most circumstances.
Science Changes (Sometimes a Lot)
Scientists are attempting to discover things that are real in the world. This means they want to know things that are universally true. These things should be true where they live, true on the other side of the world, true in outer space, etc. They do this by performing !!SCIENCE!!tm to discover what’s really true. While I’ve already written about this before, the process of performing science looks something like this.
- Determine your area of research
- Find something that needs to be understood
- Develop an educated guess about how that thing works (known as a “hypothesis”)
- Come up with a way to test whether your guess is wrong
- Design an experiment that will tell you if your guess is wrong
- Run the experiment while recording your results
- Examine your results.
- If your guess was wrong, repeat steps 3-7 until it’s not disproven
- If more tests are needed, repeat steps 3-7 several times
Note that following these steps does not guarantee a correct result. Here are three quick ways that it could fail.
- The hypothesis could incorrect in subtle ways not shown by the tests.
- The hypothesis could be correct, but not for the reasons thought.
- The test could be structured in such a way that presupposes the hypothesis is true.
As these quick examples show, there are ways that the process can fail. This is unfortunate, but it does mean that sometimes, new experiments are designed and ran to test if a hypothesis is wrong. If those tests change our understanding of the thing being researched, we update what we know about the thing.
To use a concrete example, if you’ve dropped a glass plate on the ground and it didn’t shatter, you might thing that glass plates don’t break when dropped. If you drop it a second time and it shatters, you should update what you know about glass plates being dropped. To do otherwise is madness.
The Bible Doesn’t Change (So it’s True, right?)
Since it was implied that the bible must be true since it has not changed in thousands of years, I’m going to ignore the many interpolations that have happened over the centuries. Let’s assume that the bible has not changed since it’s inception. Does that mean the bible is true? In a word, No. Absolutely not.
As stated earlier, the bible makes a lot of pseudo-scientific claims about the world. Many of these claims, such as astrology and a flat earth, have been proven to be false. Why have these incorrect views not been updated to be accurate? This alone raises many red flags about the other claims made in the bible.
Let’s narrow the field and focus on the Gospels. Again, does assuming that the gospels as written nowadays are exactly what was originally written imply that it is true? Yet again, the answer is no.
First, the works of the bible are religiously motivated works. Claims of supernatural beings performing magic abound in most religious works, and the new testament is no different. I already touched on the special pleading that is done to pretend that the bible is a special source of truth earlier.
Second, even if we ignore the special pleading, we have no way to verify that the events of the bible actually happened as they did. All we can assume is that the author wrote these words down which came to us perfectly. Without good evidence to believe the claims within, we have no reason to believe any of it is true.
Third, even if we ignore the other two points, the gospels themselves are inconsistent with each other. Mark tells a story, Matthew and Luke take parts from Mark and change events in ways that cause contradictions, and John ramps up the legendary development to eleven. If we were asked if the gospels were true, we’d have to ask “which one” since each is a different story with irreconcilable differences from the others.
Thus, an unchanged bible does not mean that the bible is true. Instead, it reflects an outdated worldview that has stagnated in light of new facts about how the world works.
Evolution
My parents repeatedly attack evolution. The primary reason they seem to attack it is because they do not understand it. This ignorance appears to be a common problem when talking to Christians. They appear to have a limited set of talking points that they think shows evolution to be a farce, but instead it shows that their understanding of evolution is a farce. Since this section deals with real science, I’ll make sure to cite sources that can be explored independently.
If you wish to read a little more about this along with refutations of common misrepresentations of evolution, please see the post I wrote before. Despite there being some overlap, I’ll examine the following claims here.
- What is Evolution?
- Basic Explanation of How Evolution Works
- Shared Origins of Life
- Transitional fossils
- Why Don’t We See Hybrid Creatures?
- Why do we still have monkeys?
What is Evolution?
Evolution is nothing more than an explanation of how life continued to develop once it arose on the planet. According to the encyclopedia britannica, evolution is a scientific
…theory in biology postulating that the various types of plants, animals, and other living things on Earth have their origin in other preexisting types and that the distinguishable differences are due to modifications in successive generations. The theory of evolution is one of the fundamental keystones of modern biological theory.
https://www.britannica.com/science/evolution-scientific-theory
A key point that is often overlooked is that evolution does not mention anything about how life arose. Instead, it explains how we come to see the great variety of life on earth once it began.
Also, because the word theory means a wildly different thing colloquially vs. scientifically, I often hear Christians trying to dismiss Evolution as “Just a theory”. Let’s examine this claim here too. Observe the definition of a theory when used in a scientific context.
Theory: a coherent group of propositions formulated to explain a group of facts or phenomena in the natural world and repeatedly confirmed through experiment or observation
https://www.dictionary.com/browse/scientific-theory
Unlike in colloquial use where theory implies a guess, often an unsubstantiated one, a scientific theory is an explanation consisting of a collection of facts, data, and experimental results. Here are three examples of well known and respected scientific theories other than evolution.
- Cell Theory
- Germ Theory of Disease
- Theory of General Relativity
As this illustrates, trying to dismiss any scientific theory as “Just a theory” is absurd at best. Theories in a scientific context are compelling explanations of the facts with the weight of experimental evidence behind them.
Basic Explanation of How Evolution Works
Recall from the definition of evolution in the previous section that the theory of evolution holds “the distinguishable differences are due to modifications in successive generations.” Put another way, you could say this means that children resemble their parents, but are not exact copies of them.
Why is it that Children tend to resemble their parents?
Gregor Mendel explored this question and published his seminal paper Experiments in Plant Hybridation (Archive Link) in 1865. While Mendel did not know the direct cause, he was successful in demonstrating that the traits of offspring are inherited from their parents. Mendel’s work went mostly unnoticed until the 1900’s, when significant research into genetics began.
The concept of a Gene, which is something that controls whether an organism has a trait or not, followed shortly in a letter from William Bateson. The precise location of genes was still uncertain, but the discovery of Chromosomes and DNA followed shortly. Even with these discoveries, it wasn’t until 1943 that DNA was confirmed to be method by which traits are inherited (Archive Link).
This means that the offspring of some creatures resembles it’s parents due to the DNA that is passed onto it. During the process of sexual reproduction, DNA from both parents is mixed together. This creates a creatures that is a hybrid with 50% if it’s DNA coming from both parents. Because the offspring has some DNA from both parents, it resembles each one in some aspect depending on what DNA it received from each.
Imperfect Replication
Because DNA is the basic element of transferring traits from one generation to the next, it seems obvious that a change in the DNA could cause changes in traits. These changes are known as mutations.
There seem to be three possibilities for how the mutations could affect the organism.
- Advantageous
- Disadvantageous
- Neither Advantageous or Disadvantageous
In the case of Advantageous mutations, something changed that caused the organism to live a better life in some way or reproduce more often. For example, imagine a bacteria living in a location with lots of plastic. If it has a mutation that allows it to create enzymes in order to eat plastic would make that bacteria’s life a lot better. It seems reasonable to assume that mutations like these would eventually become common as the children of that organism is able to reproduce more often.
In the case of Disadvantageous mutations, something changed that caused the organism to live a worse life in some way or reproduce less. For example, a mutation that causes sterility would prevent any of the organism’s genes from being passed onto future generations. It seems reasonable to assume that disadvantageous mutations would not become very common.
Finally, there are mutations that are neither Advantageous or Disadvantageous. These could be changes to the organism such as eye color, lack of hair on certain parts of the body, or even changes to parts of the DNA that do not code for any traits or proteins.
Putting it Together
Now that the basic mechanism of trait inheritance has been explained, let’s examine a concrete example. Let’s assume that two people come together and have a baby girl.
If you compare child and her parents, you will find similarities between them. Perhaps the child has similar eyes to the mother, the father’s hair color, etc. You will also find that the child has distinct differences from both. For example, perhaps the child doesn’t grow wisdom teeth (archive link) as she ages even though the parents had wisdom teeth.
This change is brought on by a mutation in the genes that code for wisdom tooth growth. Whether the change happened due to DNA in either the sperm, egg, or both is irrelevant. Now that the child has this trait, any children she has have a chance of having the same mutation expressed.
Shared Origins of Life
A direct implication of Evolution is that going back far enough in time, we will see different species emerge from a common ancestor due to variations in the mutations. This implies that all life must be related in some degree. But how can we test this? We don’t have a time machine to go back in time with to directly observe the changes over the millennia. Thankfully, we have something nearly as good: DNA.
Since DNA has been shown to be the method of trait transfer, it can be used as a method of determining how related species are to each other. We would expect creatures who have a direct common ancestor to have more DNA similarity than those who do not (known as Genetic Distance).
According to A Global Reference For Human Variation (Archive Link), the average genetic variance between humans is estimated to be around 0.6%. If we look at our closest related non-human relative, the estimated average genetic variance between humans and chimps (Archive Link) is around 2%. As we move further and further from human-like animals, we would expect this difference to continue to increase.
The more difference between one species’ DNA and anothers, the longer it’s been since they shared a common ancestor. For example, since humans and chimps share approximately 98% of their DNA, their common ancestor must have been relatively recently. If we look at another such as bananas, we find that we share approximately 60% of our DNA with them (Archive Link). This indicates that our most common ancestor with bananas was way further back in history than with chimps.
Because the exact methodology that scientists use to determine when our most common ancestors most likely lived is not important to understand the reset of the article, I’ll not be covering that here.
Transitional Fossils
Fossils are the petrified remains of long dead creatures. Due to the odd combination of circumstances that must happen for fossilization to occur, fossilization is a fairly rare event. Thankfully, for us, the large amount of species that have lived on the planet have had ample time to get into these circumstances from time to time.
Fossils are important because they provide a snapshot into the time that the animal existed. While the reasoning for why is beyond the scope of this section, if we find a large collection of fossils in the same layer of rock, we can be reasonable certain that these creatures lived close to, if not, the same time period.
This phenomenon is so well known that certain fossils can be used to give an approximate time for which era the surrounding fossils may come from. This has been summarized in a handy image (Archive Link) if you are interested in exploring it.
Ancient fossils show us a very different landscape of life on the planet than we see today. The oldest organisms on the planet have been found to be microorganisms (Archive Link), such as cyanobacteria living around 3.7-4.2 million years ago. Fossils found closer to our time show more complexity in their forms.
One claim that Evolution makes is that we should be able to find fossils that show the transition from an ancestor species to a more modern one. Two years after Darwin published On Origin of Species, a fossil of a transitional species was found.
Archaeopteryx is a curious species. It exhibits dinosaur-like traits such as claws, jaws with sharp teeth, and a long bony tail, but it also, has wings, feathers, and was likely warm blooded. Due to these traits, it’s considered an ancestor of modern birds.
There are many other transitional fossils. Rather than list them all here, I’m going to provide a link to the Wikipedia page about transitional fossils. There are hundreds of examples including a section on human evolution.
Why Don’t We See Hybrid Creatures?
While the overview I’ve given on the mechanisms of evolution barely scratches the surface on how it works, it should provide enough of an understanding to move on from talking about the basic theory to addressing the questions raised by my parents. The first objection they always raise relates to hybrid creatures. Creatures of myth and nightmare that, ironically, would disprove evolution if they actually existed.
You think that we should have a cat give birth to a rat. Or that we should see half dog half cats running around.
Source: My Parents in our Most Recent Talk
Why do they do this to me? Facepalming hurts…
Every time evolution is brought up, my parents seem to think that we should be seeing animal hybrids running all over the place. Like in the quote from them above, they think that we should see dog cats walking around, lizards interbreeding with rabbits, and half horse, half goat, half shark monstrosities wandering the waterways if evolution is true. The sad fact is, if any of these actually existed, the Theory of Evolution would be immediately overturned.
The Theory of Evolution deals with how species change over time. While one way that species can differentiate over time is through crossbreeding with closely related species, it becomes impossible for a species to interbreed as genetic drift increases. There are a variety of factors that can cause this.
Some species may be too different to crossbreed because their methods of sexual reproduction differ too much. Some species may have similar enough reproduction methods, but the eggs fail to fertilize due to chromosome or DNA differences. Even when a species is similar enough to hybridize, such as in the case of Donkeys and Horses producing a Mule, the offspring is often left sterile due to differences in the chromosomes.
Instead of disproving the theory of evolution, the attempt to show that evolution is absurd betrays a profound misunderstanding of how evolution actually works. The questions build up a ludicrous sounding strawman to attack rather than poking at any fundamental problems in evolutionary theory.
As I point out in my refutation of bad arguments against evolution, you have to understand the topic you are arguing against if you wish to have an argument from absurdity have any weight. This is especially true of evolution where building an absurd strawman to knock down simply leads to your credibility being suspect.
Why do we Still Have Monkeys?
This exact question was not asked by my parents, but their question was close enough that a response to this common question covers their question as well.
If evolution were true, we should be seeing ape-men walking around!
Source: My parents… again.
Much like the previous objection, this question betrays a misunderstanding of how evolution works. To get people to understand how evolution works, it’s common to use phrases like “Humans and Apes are related” or “Humans came from Apes”. Unfortunately, these phrases can give the wrong image in the minds on those who hear them. A more precise, but less exciting, phase would be “Humans, apes, and other monkeys are descended from a common ancestor that existed several million years ago“.
As groups of these ancient creatures moved about on land and became isolated from each other, they slowly began developing differing traits. These trait differences eventually led to an inability to interbreed with the others, a defining trait in speciation. This leads to the unthrilling conclusion that we don’t see ape-men walking about because ape-men have never existed. Instead, our most common ancestor to apes was something that had small populations of it gradually differentiate into humans, apes, or other monkeys.
The Book of Isaiah
A claim that was new to me came up in the conversion attempt. While I am very familiar with mis-attributing Isaiah 7:14 as a “prophecy” for the virgin birth claims in Matthew, this claim was a new one to me.
Have your read Isaiah? Isaiah 54? The Rabbis don’t like to talk about it. If you ask them who it’s talking about, they say “No no no, we don’t talk about that”.
My mom
Another claim
Taking a look at Isaiah 54, it appears to be nothing super special on first glance. A quick google search brings up nothing special about this particular chapter either. In true Isaiah fashion, the chapter is a short message about the future glories of Israel. The author makes some claims about the security of Israel that don’t hold up very well.
Isaiah 54:9-10 promises that God is truly on the Israelite’s side, going so far as to promise that “my steadfast love shall not depart from you, and my covenant of peace shall not be removed”. Curious how, according to Christianity, God changed his mind (or forgot about this) just a few centuries later to favor Christians instead.
Isaiah 54:16-17 promise that no weapon raised against Israel should ever prevail, and that any tongue raised against Israel in judgement will be confounded. The continual strife that has plagued the nation of Israel, up to the present day with the conflict between the Israeli and Palestinian people, is enough to show that this, too, is false.
To ensure that I didn’t simply misremember which specific chapter in Isaiah 50-59 my mom mentioned, I read through Isaiah 52, 53, 55, and 56, just in case.
Isaiah 52:1 promises that the uncircumcised and unclean will never enter Jerusalem again. This is hilariously false given the large amount of tourism that Jerusalem generates each year. Literally a single uncircumcised person entering the city makes this false, and it’s not hard to imagine that the many wars over Jerusalem since the author’s time have rendered this false years ago.
Isaiah 52:13-53:12 is often cited by Christians as a prophecy about Jesus’s Crucifixion. Unfortunately, the case for this is not so clear cut. In Isaiah 52, the author has been talking about Israel, and this continues through Isaiah 53 and 54. It seems more likely that these sections are referring to the mistreatment of Israel.
Isaiah 53:4-6 are especially contested since it calls out so many things referenced in Matthew. However, it is far more likely that as a writer coming after Isaiah, Matthew, who appears to have been motivated to show that all prophecies in the bible point to Jesus, wrote his gospel narrative with it in mind. Amusingly enough, Isaiah 53:4 is misquoted by Matthew in Matthew 8:17.
Claiming Isaiah 53:5-6 as a prophecy is especially suspicious when you consider the following about the gospels.
Mark, which was written first, does not mention any piercing of Jesus. Luke, which was written about the same time as Matthew, also mentions nothing about Jesus being pierced at all. It’s not until several decades after Matthew was written that we see another gospel mention Jesus being pierced in John.
Isaiah 53:10 is a pretty clear indication that the author is not talking about Jesus at all in any of these verses. This verse claims that “…he will see his offspring and prolong his days”. Jesus…. died young and childless.
In another form of failed “prophecy”, Luke misquotes Isaiah 53:12 in Luke 22:37 to make it seem like a prophecy. Reading through the verse makes it very clear that Jesus is neither mentioned anywhere, nor are there any indications that this is intended as a prophecy at all. Instead, if anything, it sounds like a promise to split the spoils of war with someone.
Isaiah 55:8 is one of the more infuriating passages in the bible. It can be directly attributed to an unwillingness to consider any viewpoint other than those expressed in the bible. It can also be directly attributed to a dismissal of those who offer viewpoints other than those considered in the bible. In short, we can’t understand God’s ways because we are not God.
Because someone has already answered why this form of argumentation is meaningless, here is a link to his video. He explains it far more eloquently than I could. If you did not watch the video, let’s just say that you can use this as a response to any theological claim of any faith. If you think that the Quran is too violent, then you just don’t understand God’s ways. If you think that Hinduism is nonsensical, then you clearly don’t understand the ways of the gods.
A defense that can be used for any claim does not provide evidence for any specific claim.
Isaiah 56 had nothing of note in it.
Conclusion
In conclusion, I have yet to receive any compelling evidence for Christianity (or any religion in general). Most of the claims that were presented were retellings of older claims that I have heard before, just put in a slightly different format. As always, the most misrepresented item by them was evolution. The way they attempted to paint evolution as foolish merely highlighted their lack of understanding in the mechanisms of evolution.
The only new claim I received was about Isaiah 54, but examining it brought nothing new to light.